


Kind Regrets

by ophelia_interrupted



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Fluff and Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 13:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4565922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelia_interrupted/pseuds/ophelia_interrupted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard has become fashionable up on the Hill, and Alec helps him answer his mail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kind Regrets

            In the wake of his release from jail, Richard found that he was disconcertingly popular.  Riversiders banged on his door at all hours of the day and night, wanting to ask the same questions: _Did you really kill a lord?  Why didn’t they hang you?  Is Alec really who they’re saying he is?_   He asked Marie to tell them that he wasn’t home, but it never did any good.  They always knew.

            His attempts to escape Riverside in order to get some peace were frustrated as well.  On the Hill people didn’t pester him with questions, but he could feel their eyes on him wherever he went.  Women whispered behind painted fans, men came up to him in the street and tried to talk to him about things like hunting and politics.  They were disappointed when it turned out that he had no opinions on either. 

            “How long is this going to last?” he asked Alec, exasperated.

            His lover shrugged and said, “Their attention span isn’t very long.  Pretty soon some new fashion or scandal will come along, and they’ll forget about you again.”

            As far as Richard was concerned, that couldn’t happen too soon.  He took to spending much of his time in his room, attacking the wall, which made a rhythmic _thunk, thunk, thunk_ sound that partially drowned out the knocking. 

            Eventually, sheer hunger drove him out to the market, where some small boys irritated him by daring each other to touch the scabbard of his sword.  He would never have really drawn on a child, but he gripped the hilt and glared at them anyway, to make them run away.  To his relief, there was no one at his door when he returned home. 

            He walked in the door to find Alec sitting at the table, which was covered in piles of papers and envelopes.  “What’s this?” he asked.  Since the table was buried, he had to put his basket down on a chair. 

            “This,” Alec said sourly, “is the mail.”

            “They don’t deliver mail on this side of the bridge,” Richard said, pulling up a chair.

            “No.  This stack I picked up at Roaslie’s,” Alec said, lifting a pile of folded papers, each sealed by a glob of red wax.  “And this,” his expansive gesture took in the rest of the table, “has been delivered to Tremontaine House since your trial.  My dear grandmamma sent it here with one of her serving girls.”

            Richard looked at the near-indecipherable writings on the front of the envelopes with concern.  He recognized his first name written on them: R-I-C-H-A-R-D.  “They know we’re not just associated through Lord Ferris?” he asked.

            “They know everything,” Alec said with disgust.  Richard felt bad for him.  He knew the young man valued his privacy. 

            “What do they say?” he asked.

            “It varies,” Alec said.  “I’ve separated them into sub-piles based on their topics.  You can throw these in the fire straight away.”  He lifted a hefty chunk of mail and dropped it onto the floor.

            To Richard’s surprise, all the seals were still intact.  “You’re not even going to open them?”

            “No.”

            “Why not?”

            “They’re addressed to me,” Alec said.  “Two-thirds are from Riversiders—you can tell because there are no envelopes and the writing on the front is mostly done by the same two or three scribes.  Nobody in Riverside wanted anything to do with me until they found out who my grandmother is.  They want money now.  As if I had any to give them.

            “The remaining third are from the University and the Hill.  Most of the letters from the University will be from impoverished professors writing tedious books, who are looking for a patron.  I wouldn’t patronize a boring book if I could.  And the ones from the Hill are just friends of my grandmother’s, looking to pry some gossip out of me.  No.  They go in the burn pile.”

            “What about the rest of it?” Richard asked. 

            “These are invitations to parties,” Alec said, pointing to the largest pile.  Then he pointed to a stack of two envelopes.  “These are invitations to good parties.  Those over there are attempts to get you to work at weddings, birthday parties, and that sort of thing, which I’m not even going to dignify with a reply.  These are letters propositioning you sexually.  And this pile is miscellaneous—things like asking you to work at a wedding while propositioning you sexually.” 

            Richard picked up a letter from the miscellaneous pile.  It was on thick, creamy paper with writing in violet ink, done in a round and looping hand.  He thought he caught a scent from it and lifted it to his nose.  “It smells like lilac,” he said. 

            “You can keep it to smell it if you like,” Alec said.  “Or if you want to answer it, it’s an invitation to a party with an incidental request to take you to bed.”

            “I’m not interested in the sexual ones,” Richard said.

            Alec nodded, satisfied.  “Burn pile,” he said.

            “Burn pile,” Richard agreed, dropping the miscellaneous letters on top of Alec’s correspondence. 

            “That was actually the second ‘Come to a party and then get into bed with me’ letter you got,” Alec said.  “The first one was from a debutante, the daughter of a Baron.  Or at least if I read her clumsy literary allusions correctly, she was trying to get you into bed.  She may be too well-bred—and therefore ignorant—to know that’s what she’s asking for.”

            “No debutante parties, no sex,” Richard said.

            “I thought about folding it into another letter and sending it straight back to her mother, but then I decided that would be boring.  So I put it in a new envelope and addressed it to another Society lady entirely,” Alec said.

            “Won’t that lady tell everyone about it?” Richard asked.

            “Probably.”

            “That seems harsh on the debutante.  How old are debutantes anyway?  Fifteen?  Sixteen?”

            “That’s about right, yes,” Alec said.

            “Maybe you should reconsider,” Richard said.

            Alec shrugged.  “Too late.  I already sent it with somebody.  She should have thought about what she was doing before she propositioned a swordsman, anyway, especially in writing.  I recommend that you move all of the invitations to boring parties to the burn pile as well, unless you want to look at them first.  Some of them are on beautiful stationery.”

            “Any other scented ones?” Richard asked.

            Alec fished a letter on powder-blue paper out of the pile, and sniffed it.  “Rosewater,” he said, and handed it to Richard.  Richard held it up to his nose.  It smelled like a lady’s boudoir.

            “That leaves the invitations to good parties.  This one is a garden party which is worth going to because the family employs an absolutely fabulous pastry chef.  This is an invitation to a masked ball, which is interesting because you can go and watch all the best people doing all the worst things.”  Alec held up both letters.

            “If you want to go, I’ll go,” Richard said.

            “Good,” Alec said.  “I’ll send our acceptances.”

            The garden party turned out to be very boring, full of young ladies in pastel muslin dresses playing lawn bowls, until Alec got into a loud argument with the grandmother of the family about the aesthetic and moral principles of orgies in antiquity.  As two burly footmen marched him out, he managed a successful grab at the pastry table, where he was able to acquire several small iced cakes.

            The masked ball was interesting at first, until Richard sorted out that really it was just a bunch of drunk people in nice clothes, flirting crudely and imagining that no one knew who they were.  Alec got thrown out of that one, too, for calling attendees by their right names and inquiring after the health of relatives who were not supposed to know they were there. 

            Both times, Richard trailed Alec out, despite the hosts’ blandishments that he stay.  He had never been to parties on the Hill as a guest before, and he found the experience disappointing. 

            The party invitations dried up after that.

            A few days after the masked ball, Alec and Richard were lying in bed.  Richard lay with his head in the crook of his lover’s shoulder, while Alec lamented that he was now out of iced cakes.  When Alec spoke, Richard could hear his voice reverberating in his chest.  “I purposely stretched them out to make them last, too,” he said.

            “When I get money again, we’ll go to one of the Hill bakeries and buy you all the iced cakes you want,” Richard said.

            “It’s not the same unless I steal them myself,” Alec said moodily.

            “Maybe I’ll be fashionable again someday, and the family with the pastry chef will invite us back.  Or maybe he’ll get fired, and go to work for some family that hasn’t thrown you out yet,” Richard said.

            Alec brightened a little at that.  “Maybe,” he said.

            They lay in companionable silence for a while after that.  Richard reached up and toyed with a strand of Alec’s hair, feeling the feathery ends brush across his fingers.  Then, impulsively, he wrapped his arm around Alec’s ribcage and crushed him to himself.  “Ah, I love you.  You do everything for me,” he said.

            Alec returned the embrace, but he said, “Answering your correspondence and dragging you to parties you’d rather not be at hardly qualifies as ‘everything.’”

            “You saved me from being executed.  You went to your grandmother for help, and you let people know who you really are,” Richard said.  He knew how much it had cost Alec, emotionally, to do the last two things.  He was still getting adjusted to the idea that Alec was the one who had protected him.  He wasn’t used to that—he hadn’t had a protector in his life since he was a child.  He found he liked it.

            “I couldn’t let them execute you.  You’re mine,” Alec said. 

            “Yes,” Richard agreed, kissing the fine-grained skin of Alec’s chest.  “I’m yours.”

            “In that case,” Alec drawled, “I’d like to cordially invite you to fuck me blind.”

            “Accepted,” Richard said, moving up to kiss Alec’s lips. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Kind Regrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13950951) by [mikan199](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikan199/pseuds/mikan199)




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